


You only have the One

by HTFNoelle



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, F/M, Oneshot, Origins, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 20:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4850237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HTFNoelle/pseuds/HTFNoelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Thedas everyone has a soulmate. This is about two people who lost theirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You only have the One

Everyone has one soul mate.

They may never see them. They may never keep them. Or they may not be what they expect.

But should they ever meet them, they always know.

—

She is ten, all arms and legs and sharp edges already and her wrist itches madly. She scratches it with frantic fingers, nails biting again and again, but it doesn’t ease. She sleeps poorly for two days, and by the end of it her wrist is bloody red. But when her mother cleans it there are more than just scratches.

A name. There's shock and smiles and questions, so many questions.

—

Six years later her mother is around no longer. Dead eight months past with a city guard’s sword through her heart. She’d heard her father’s cry of pain as a line opened through the name on his shoulder. She’d heard his cry of anguish when he realized what it meant.

He carries the scar still. He always will. 

A name still lies unmarked upon her wrist, but she hasn’t met him. Perhaps she never will. Surely, if they were meant to meet, he would have been in the alienage.

So when a man tells her not to wait for someone who will not come, she doesn’t.

—

She is seventeen and she wears a bracer on her wrist. She is tired of the jokes that she wears her heart upon her sleeve. It is a name of someone she will never meet, never know. They are not her heart. 

That belongs to someone else. 

—

She is eighteen and she stabs that someone in the chest. 

—

She is twenty and she has a job that is not serving ale. The bracer is still on her arm. There is no need to look at it. She is of age enough that people will ask, and she does not want to hear how she will meet them someday.

She doesn’t care, not really. She tells herself this as she traces the letters in the dark. Her fingers mapping and remapping the lines.

—

Five and a half years, a job, and a polite mask later have not made her worthy for more than a night. She does not care.

Her father does. Coin will work where nothing else will, and so he writes some letters, mentions the name upon her wrist. He gets a response, more than he hoped for. A match. When he tells her she does not know what to feel, but the name burns. 

For once it isn’t ignored.

—

It is her wedding day. Her wrist is on fire when they meet. He is nervous and so is she, but they _match_.

She sees him cut down scant hours later. A wound opening on her wrist at the same time as her heart. She ignores it, pockets a ring that rolls free and keeps going. Shianni is still in danger, there is no time for could-have-been’s. What if’s will never matter as much as what is.

An hour later she’s conscripted. Good-byes are said. Hugs exchanged. No one notices the blood leaking from her wrist. She can't go, but Duncan takes her anyway. 

But what is she without her family? 

—

She is a Grey Warden.

She snatches at the title, holds it close. A direction. A purpose. Then Ostagar happens and everything is crumbling again, but she has a new goal. That is all she needs. It is the thought that grounds her as they trek across Ferelden, darkspawn and demons and monsters far less obvious falling before them. 

Yet, the Crow lives. He isn’t innocent, but her blood isn’t quite cold enough to spill his then and there. 

—

He lives, and she sees his mark weeks later, deftly hidden in the crow that sweeps its wings across his shoulders. She sounds it out, thoughtless of the new and ugly line drawn through it.

He goes still. His voice is a hiss when he asks her where she heard it. 

She tells him, taps the mark once with her finger, and his hand goes to it, reaching awkwardly for the spot. Fingers searching and desperate and she doesn’t know why it is so, for a moment.

“Didn’t ya know it was there?” she asks, and he shakes his head. 

They speak no more, after that. His eyes are full of wonder and pain, and hers cannot leave the line across his back.  

_'Another sort of match,’_  a small part of her whispers, and she grinds it beneath her heel. Alone  _together_ is not a fate she wishes. 

—

She doesn’t ask, but he tells her the story of the the name a few days later. Rinala, a fellow Crow. Dead, because of him. He didn’t know. Had always thought himself without a mark. Had never seen his name upon her. 

He didn’t know, and apologies spill from her. They jumble together as they force their way out. Faster and faster until she is tripping over herself trying to make him understand. (As if that matters.) 

He waves them away, “I had always wondered if I had a name. It is good to know I did, yes?” He smiles then, wry and weary. 

Her hand goes to her bracer, fingers clenching over the leather, “B-better to’ve loved and lost?” Her voice is a pathetic thing, weak and tentative. It is unlike her, and the harsh laugh that comes from his throat is unlike him. But it stretches on and on, and she cannot help but notice it sounds like a crow’s raucous cry. 

“No.” He says, when he runs out of breath, “No, I think not,”

The leather creaks under her fingers, “I know what ya mean.” 

—

He doesn’t change after that. He was already grieving, and she has feeling he is used to salt being put in his wounds. Rinala is dead. Yet he seems no more broken knowing who she was to him. He is as much himself as he ever was, and she is not sure what to think. 

She cannot keep the curiosity at bay. Cannot stop the poking, prodding question of: “How can you stand it?”

He, at least, is kind enough not to make her explain what “it” is. He also does not stop his sly smile as he says, “How do you?”

“That’s not-” she starts her clumsy lie, but his brows raise and his eyes go to her bracer for just a moment. A glance around tells her no one else is close enough to have heard. So instead she pulls him down, hisses at him, “Shut up!”

“You asked  _me_ , my dear warden.” 

She slaps her hand over his mouth. Hisses at him again to be quiet, but he just pulls her hand away to squeeze it in both of his, “They can’t hear. But if they did it wouldn’t matter. It isn’t that hard to tell, you know. You only have the one bracer, after all.” both their gazes flick down to stare at it, old leather flecked with new stains from the fights against darkspawn. 

Then she yanks her hand from his grasp, drawing her other from his collar as she retreats. Fingers clenching over the leather, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does,” he replies, closing the gap. 

“I only knew him for an hour,” she does not retreat anymore. She only stares at him.

He pauses mid-stride, eyes widening. When he looks at her, his gaze has shifted. The expected pity isn’t there, however. Only sadness. His, “I am sorry,” is welcome, then. He is the first person to tell her that since she had said goodbye to her family. Since the numbness of that day had faded. 

She feels tears building. Feels floodgates of grief bursting open at long last. So she shrugs, smiles bitterly, “So am I,” then she tries to leave, to run and hide so she can sob somewhere alone, but he catches her.

She cries into his chest instead. 

—

A few days later he sits next to her. There is no one else around, he made sure of that. Then he speaks, because he cannot stop the poking prodding question of, “An hour? It must have been quite the hour, yes?” Anymore than she could have stopped hers. 

It feels like a brick in the face, but she knew it would come eventually. She doesn’t flinch, “No. It wasn’t.” 

Silence falls, fast and heavy in the moment she pauses to take a breathe. 

“And it was more like fifteen minutes, but that doesn’t really roll off the tongue as well, does it?” There is no acid in her tone, but the sarcasm drips from it hard enough to seem so.

He looks away, “No, I suppose not.” 

The silence falls again. Faster, heavier. But his pause is not of a breath and it stretches on and on. A minute stretched into sixty as he tries to think what to say. Eventually he does, but for all the time it took him, he cannot even finish, “I did not think he was…” 

“Dead?” She says for him. “Why not?”

“Because you don’t deserve that.”

His reply is instant, without a hint of question. She stares at him. Then she laughs. Hard and loud and for far, far too long to be anything but derisive. 

“You’re an _assassin_ ,” ahe chokes out, “Don’t ya know it doesn’t matter what someone deserves? Haven’t ya done bad things to good people a hundred times? As your bloody _job_?” she keeps laughing, although by the end her shoulders shake with more than mirth.

“I am also ever the optimist. Haven’t you noticed?” He asks when she is finally quiet. There is too much sadness in his voice. Too much guilt. He is sorry about more than her loss. 

Her fingers dance along the laces of her bracer until it slips free and she can show him the wound is still quite unopened, the scar just as old as it had been when he had asked, “Well this time you were wrong.”

He grabs her wrist with one hand, eyes dropping to look at the name there. She sees him mouth it, but no sound comes out. Then he looks up again, “And never was I more sorry to be so.”

“Never?” She asks. She stares at him- through him- to the name on his back.

“Almost never,” he amends, her wrist still in his grasp. She can pull it free, if she wished. He is not holding very tight. She leans against him instead, and for the first time since she left the alienage, she feels at home.


End file.
